The country's largest trade union Siptu has warned that it will engage in strikes and industrial action to protect the pension entitlements of its members.
Speaking at Siptu's biennial delegate conference in Ennis, Co Clare this afternoon, the union's vice-president Patricia King warned a "major catastrophe is careering down the tracks" in relation to retirement income.
She said the Government's new 0.6 per cent pension levy was making the problem worse.
Ms King said the union would resist any attempt to make workers pay for the new pension levy. She said it was a a matter for the employers and the pension industry to meet this cost.
Ms King said another, bigger problem "lurking beyond the horizon" was the insolvency of most of the country's defined benefit schemes, which cover more than 550,000 people.
"The authorities are straining at the leash to impose a funding standard which, in current conditions, will create chaos, resulting in the collapse of many, many pension schemes," she told delegates.
She said "blind adherence" to a funding standard mechanism designed to condemn thousands of workers to live in poverty in retirement would be a grave mistake.
She said pension funds needed time to recover and new initiatives were required.
"We need direct engagement with the authorities urgently. However, if the pension regulator and others in authority, insist on enforcing [the new funding standard] we will do the only thing we can – in the event of any scheme collapsing – which is to confront the employer directly," she said.
"We will fight on this issue and we will promote industrial action and strikes to preserve pension schemes," said Ms King. "If they want chaos, insisting on this funding standard is the way to get it."